Last night on television: Nature Shock (Five) - Mistresses (BBC1)

By James Walton

12:01AM GMT 13 Feb 2008

By James Walton

Last night’s Nature Shock (Five) was one of those wildlife documentaries with pretensions to being a horror movie. As a result, the narrator began by introducing us to a group of “aliens with no head, no bones and no heart, but armed with the most toxic venom known to science”. Not only that, but “these creatures are heading straight for us” with their “hypodermic harpoons”.

In other words, this was a programme about jellyfish. To help us understand just how scary they are, we met “world jellyfish expert” Jamie Seymour, a bluff Aussie whose zoological style seems to have been heavily influenced by the late Steve Irwin.

Jamie’s first job was to prove that the billions of jellyfish out in the ocean are indeed heading for land. “Attaching a tag to a jellyfish is bloody difficult,” he unsurprisingly informed us. Luckily, the solution had come to him in what he referred to as “a drunken stupor”: he’d use superglue.

In this way, Jamie established not only that these silent assassins are coming towards the Australian coast, but that they’re doing so faster than the average Olympic swimmer. “It’s going to have a monumental impact,” he concluded in an unmistakeably thrilled tone. “No other venom kills human beings so quickly.”

With these bone-chilling details in place, the rest of the documentary concentrated on all the efforts that have been made to avert the coming catastrophe, and how spectacularly they’ve failed. The Japanese authorities recently ordered a massive jellyfish cull – but, in best horror-movie style, the more they’re killed, the more they breed. Nets have been placed around the swimming areas on Australian beaches – but tiny jellyfish can still get through the holes and cause the sort of carnage that soon had the narrator excitedly smacking his lips. (“Thirty minutes later, the victims had severe muscle cramps and had lost control of their arms and legs. And that was just the beginning…”)

Of course, as with all programmes like this, the agony was piled on with such overstated relish that it became impossible to know what was TV hype and what was true. At no point, for example, did we learn how many people these ruthless killers have actually killed. Even so, when it came to its main aim of frightening the life out of us, there’s no denying Nature Shock did a pretty solid job.

The final episode of Mistresses (BBC1) was dominated by chickens coming home to roost – not just for the characters, but also for the programme itself. Having set up all those ludicrous plot-lines, it was now required convincingly to resolve them. The task duly proved well beyond its capabilities, not least because, once again, the dialogue consisted of little more than a series of clichés haphazardly bolted together.

The first showdown was between Katie (Sarah Parish) and Simon (Adam Astill), whose terminally-ill father she’d had an affair with, before performing euthanasia on him and hooking up with the son. Now, as she prepared to appear at a medical review board charged with malpractice, Simon wanted to check their relationship was still on course. “I need to talk,” was his opening gambit – followed, inevitably, by “I love you, don’t you understand that” and “I need to know that you care about me”. Fortunately, she did.

By the end, she even seemed to be wondering whether to go back to Karl or not – although both options now look like a defeat. Meanwhile, Karl himself has had a complete mental breakdown, which, like the alcoholism of Donna’s good-time friend Karen (Tanya Franks), is played for dark laughs, but without ever feeling cruel.

Paul (Charles Edwards), sad to say, had less luck getting Trudi (Sharon Small) to forgive him for faking his death in the 9/11 attacks and clearing off to spend the past seven years with his mistress and their child. Admittedly, she did wobble a bit when he told her “I never stopped loving you, Trudi”. In the end, though, she decided to shop him to the police instead.